Blogosphere,  Conservatives

The Demise of the Conservative Blogosphere – John Hawkins Edition

The demise of the independent conservative blogosphere is simply overestimated by John Hawkins. In other words, John boy has it wrong.

Most bloggers are not very good at marketing, not very good at monetizing, there are no sugar daddies giving us cash, and this isn’t the biggest market in the world to begin with. In other words, this is a time-consuming enterprise, but few people are going to make enough money to go full time. How many people can put in 20-30-40-50 hours a week on something that’s not going to ever be their full time job? Can they do it for 5 years? 10 years? 15? 20? This is the plight that 99.9% of serious, independent conservative bloggers face. This has already created a lot of attrition and over the next few years, as people realize that their traffic is more likely to slowly, but surely significantly deteriorate rather than explode, you’re going to see a lot more people give up.

Bloggers have asked me: So what’s the strategy to deal with this?

Really, it’s simple: Get big or go home.

Find a way to dramatically increase the size of your blog, expand into multiple websites that together are big, hook up with someone who’s already big, or accept that there isn’t much of a future in a small, niche market for you. Maybe that sounds a little grim, but unless something changes, independent conservative bloggers who haven’t already made it big don’t have a bright future.

No, I cannot agree. There is more to life than traffic to blogs for the conservative world. There is Twitter which has jump-started the Tea Party and to a lesser extent there is Facebook where conservatives can more socially interact. Google Plus has just started and there will be a place for conservative bloggers there as well.

The blogosphere and social media are interconnected and it is far better for the smaller, independent blogger.

When I first started this enterprise over five years ago, nobody knew who the hell I was or cared. The large blogs (the ones with the most traffic) linked within themselves. Nobody gave a rat’s ass about the upstarts in the sphere. But, with Twitter and Facebook, content and opinion hit the internet without the filter of Instapundit or Powerline. Traffic to the independents grew and so did modest ad revenue.

Power in the blogosphere shifted to the small, independent blogger who might cover more, especially in their own locale. Commentary was not limited to large blogs comments sections but to Twitter and Facebook.

So, with these changes, why would anyone quit?

In the era of the grass-roots Tea Party, it is time to get started.

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